Charles Laughton Read Free Page A

splendidly feisty name of rootingforlaughton. Her work, and that of other isolated researchers has greatly deepened our knowledge of Laughton, and should be the basis of a new biography. But there is no sign of that on the horizon, and none of it materially alters our understanding of his acting; the new research has augmented and supplemented my findings, not, I’m relieved to say, invalidated them.
    Except in one area.
    I said at the beginning of this introduction that Laughton had faded from public consciousness, ‘as an actor, at any rate’. But that was not the end of Laughton. The most unexpected, the most improbable , thing has occurred: he has become more famous for the one film he directed than for all the once legendary performances he gave as an actor. The irony is all the richer since the failure of the film, both critically and commercially, broke his heart. The outcome of this wholly unexpected development has been a great growth of scholarship concerning
The Night of the Hunter
. When I was writing my book, I had access to the manuscript (now successfully published) of Preston Neal Jones’s outstanding work of oral history,
Heaven and Hell to play With
, which records the memories of as many participants in the film as were alive at the time of writing. I had personally spoken to the Sanders Brothers, who had been Laughton’s Second Unit directors on the film, and, however monosyllabically, to the film’s superb star, Robert Mitchum. I had of course read all the memoirs of those involved, and other interviews conducted with members of the team. Most of my information on the film – how it came about and how filming had proceeded – came from various interviews, not conducted by myself, with the film’s producer, Paul Gregory. And Gregory, a colourful character, told a vivid story, especially about James Agee’s contribution to the film. Whatever his previous triumphs, both as screenwriter (
The African Queen
) and as elegiast of the South (
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
), Agee, Gregory reported – and is duly quoted by me as saying – was a hopeless drunk, who produced a grotesquely overlong screenplay that Laughton never so much as looked at, instead himself writing a version more or less overnight, which they then proceeded to shoot; Gregory added that Agee had been booted off the set by Laughton. His wholly undeserved credit nonetheless stood, because, Gregory said, they didn’t like to kick a man when he was down. In my biography, I added to this sustained vilification of Agee by crying fraud over the fact that Laughton’s screenplay was later, posthumously, ‘good enough,’ as I said, ‘to have been passed off for years (in
Five Film Scripts
by James Agee) as the work of a seasoned genius.’ The original screenplay had long ago disappeared.
    Some years after
Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor
came out, I was asked by the BFI to write a monograph on
The Night of the Hunter
, and in preparation, I took stock of the latest research, by Jones and others. Various perfectly lucid memos from Agee had come to light which suggested that whatever he might have done in his spare time, he was far from drunk on the job, that Laughton seemed to respect him at all times, that he himself sought to share his credit with Laughton for the latter’s contribution to the screenplay, that he remained on the payroll for the full five weeks during which he undertook re-writes, and that he took a keen interest in the editing of the film. I assimilated all this material into a revised view of Agee’s contribution, but in the absence of the original screenplay, I concluded that nonetheless Laughton was substantially responsible for the script as filmed. The book duly came out to appreciative murmurings in the world of Film Studies. Then, a couple of months after publication, I received two letters within a very short space of time. One was from Paul Gregory, who, to my embarrassment, I had thought had gone to the